Backend Engineer, Application Platform (Remote)

Figma; New York (NY); On-site; USD 153,000 - 376,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health, dental, and vision coverage

Retirement plan

Parental leave

Job summary

Figma is seeking an experienced backend engineer with strong production Ruby experience to build scalable platforms for engineers. You’ll design shared Ruby frameworks for REST APIs and asynchronous jobs, improve system availability and performance, and modernize a large codebase by moving APIs from Sinatra toward Rails.

You will mentor peers and help shape pragmatic engineering practices across teams. The role is full-time and can be based at a US hub or remote within the United States, with

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years building production systems with Ruby.
• Build, maintain, and evolve large Ruby applications and shared backend codebases.
• Design reliable distributed systems at production scale, including APIs, background processing, testing, observability, and operations.
• Improve complex, established systems through architecture, modularization, migrations, performance, reliability, or developer tooling.
• Create scalable abstractions, navigate technical tradeoffs, and mentor engineers across teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve shared Ruby frameworks for REST APIs, asynchronous jobs, workflow orchestration, and data access.
• Improve the availability, reliability, scalability, and performance of backend systems that support critical product functionality.
• Modernize a large Ruby codebase through safe architectural changes, including moving REST APIs from Sinatra toward Rails and introducing stronger endpoint abstractions and type safety.
• Make backend development faster by improving hot reloading, local workflows, test infrastructure, CI reliability, debugging tools, and iteration speed.
• Strengthen the scalability, isolation, observability, and recovery capabilities of Figma’s asynchronous job platform.
• Partner with product engineers—your customers—and Infrastructure teams to identify recurring pain points and turn them into reusable platform capabilities.
• Establish pragmatic engineering practices through shared libraries, APIs, documentation, tooling, code review, and technical guidance.
• Mentor other engineers and contribute to a culture of thoughtful execution, high technical standards, and shared ownership.

Skills

Ruby

REST APIs

Distributed systems

Code quality

Mentoring

Tools

Ruby on Rails

Sinatra

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

Figma is seeking an experienced backend engineer with strong production Ruby experience to build scalable platforms for engineers. You’ll design shared Ruby frameworks for REST APIs and asynchronous jobs, improve system availability and performance, and modernize a large codebase by moving APIs from Sinatra toward Rails.

You will mentor peers and help shape pragmatic engineering practices across teams. The role is full-time and can be based at a US hub or remote within the United States, with